Fragment-based prediction of skin sensitization using recursive partitioning

Skin sensitization is an important toxic endpoint in the risk assessment of chemicals. In this paper, structure–activity relationships analysis was performed on the skin sensitization potential of 357 compounds with local lymph node assay data. Structural fragments were extracted by GASTON (GrAph/Sequence/Tree extractiON) from the training set. Eight fragments with accuracy significantly higher than 0.73 (p < 0.1) were retained to make up an indicator descriptor fragment. The fragment descriptor and eight other physicochemical descriptors closely related to the endpoint were calculated to construct the recursive partitioning tree (RP tree) for classification. The balanced accuracy of the training set, test set I, and test set II in the leave-one-out model were 0.846, 0.800, and 0.809, respectively. The results highlight that fragment-based RP tree is a preferable method for identifying skin sensitizers. Moreover, the selected fragments provide useful structural information for exploring sensitization mechanisms, and RP tree creates a graphic tree to identify the most important properties associated with skin sensitization. They can provide some guidance for designing of drugs with lower sensitization level.